Roccat celebrates 10 years with the Kone Aimo mouse

Which companies come to mind when you're thinking about gaming input devices, gerbils? Is Roccat on that list? If not, it probably should be. The German company sells some fine hardware for participating in computer-simulated conflicts, and has done so for a little over 10 years now. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of its original Kone mouse, Roccat has released the Kone Aimo.

The latest revision of Roccat's flagship gaming mouse is not a huge change for the line. The rodent has a total of 12 programmable functions, including a tilting scroll wheel. If that's not enough functionality, the Kone Aimo supports Roccat's Easy-Shift feature so you can hold a button on the mouse or your Roccat keyboard to "shift" to another layer of functions. You can save your settings to the mouse as well, so you don't have to install the company's Swarm software on every machine you want to use.

Like the rest of Roccat's high-end mice, the Kone Aimo uses Roccat's Owl-Eye sensor. For those unfamiliar, Owl-Eye is a customized version of the top-class PixArt PMW3360 optical IR sensor that you'll find in almost every other top-tier gaming mouse. The Owl-Eye tops out at an extremely-excessive 12,000 DPI, and given its heritage it should track flawlessly at almost any speed without prediction or acceleration.

Along with a refined design and updated software, the 10th-anniversary mouse also debuts Roccat's Aimo RGB LED lighting system. Aimo is similar to Asus' Aura Sync or Gigabyte's RGB Fusion, but it's actually closest to Razer's Chroma system in that Aimo purports to react dynamically to user input. It's not really clear how the system works, but if nothing else it's compatible with Alienware's AlienFX. Of course, users can also simply use it to synchronize RGB LED lighting across their Roccat devices.

The Kone Aimo has been available in Europe since late September, but now it's available world-wide. You can pick it up at Newegg in black, gray, or white for $80. If you prefer, all three options are also available at Amazon for the same price: black, gray, or white. Roccat should already be winging a Kone Aimo my way for a review, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested but not yet convinced.